In the following review of Dinner with Friends, Brustein praises Margulies for creating "a mood of bittersweet nostalgia"

Dinner with Friends (Variety Arts) is a new play by Donald Margulies that is also about a broken contract, this time between a husband and a wife The play follows two couples-Gabe and Karen, Beth and Tom-during a twelve year period. Over a dinner of red wine, grilled lamb, pumpkin risotto, and polenta (food is the central metaphor of the play), Beth tells her hosts that Tom is leaving her for another woman. Their sex life has been deteriorating and, as Tom later reveals to the same friends, Beth has killed his self-confidence as a man.

What Margulies proceeds to anatomize is the impact of this mental crisis on the other couple. The four friends had spent many happy summers and eaten many gourmet meals together on Martha's Vineyard...